Drowned Boy Was `Good Kid,' Dad Says

RENTON

Heang Chhour was a straight-A student and a sports fanatic.

When he wasn't studying, the 15-year-old Renton boy lived and breathed sports, his family said. He loved basketball the most but played football, too. And he was a good swimmer.

That's why his grieving family yesterday was at a loss to understand how their second son simply disappeared beneath Lake Washington at a well-watched Houghton Beach Park swimming area Tuesday and drowned while swimming with a buddy.

"He was always such a good kid; I loved that boy," his father, Heng Chhour, said yesterday, sobbing. "I don't know why it happened to a good kid like that."

Heang Chhour went to the Kirkland park Tuesday afternoon to attend his friend's birthday party, his family said.

He and his friend swam together to a floating platform in the middle of the park's roped-in water hole, where lifeguards stood watch. On the swim back to shore, Chhour's friend turned around to find him gone.

The friend looked for him unsuccessfully, then notified lifeguards, who quickly found the lifeless boy and pulled him onto the beach.

The lifeguards and, later, medical crews tried for 45 minutes to resuscitate Chhour, to no avail.

Yesterday, the King County Medical Examiner's Office said an autopsy revealed Chhour simply drowned, with no other apparent injuries or health problems that contributed.

Unfortunately, medical examiner's staff members said, that's all too common. Chhour's death was the fourth drowning in Kirkland in four years and the second this month.

Chhour was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1984, two years after his father and mother, Kien Sok, fled with his older brother from communist Cambodia. A year later the family made it to the United States.

The family grew to five sons as Chhour's parents did landscaping and housecleaning to afford a modest split-level home in a middle-class north Renton suburb.

Last year, Chhour went out for the freshman basketball and football teams at Sammamish High School. He wasn't very big - in team photos, he was always the skinny kid in the front row. But he never let that stop him.

"Keep jumping, you'll get rim eventually," a pal wrote in his yearbook.

When he wasn't playing sports, he was watching them on TV or enacting them on home video games, his uncle Sam Tith said.

And Chhour excelled in school.

"A pleasure to have in class; excellent student," his literature teacher added to his spring report card, which sported a 4.0 grade-point average. He had a 3.7 average overall.

"Most of his friends, they loved him," his uncle said. "They always say he's a good boy."

Now the family wonders why he drowned. But worse, they said, they have to bury their boy.

"They all worked very hard," Tith said. "They're a very happy family. They've been through a lot. And now, big sadness."